Communities Making Social Change from Below. Social Innovation and Democratic Leadership in Two Disenfranchised Neighbourhoods in Barcelona

“This is a Pre Print version of an article published by Taylor & Francis in [Urban Research & Practice] on [22 janvier 2018], available at https://www.tandfonline.- com/doi/full/10.1080/17535069.2018.1426782 ” Communities making social change from below. Social innovation and democratic leadership in two disenfranchised neighbourhoods in Barcelona. Santiago Eizaguirre RG - Creativity, Innovation and Urban Transformation (CRIT) Department of Sociology. University of Barcelona [email protected] Marc Parés RG - Urban Governance, Commons, Internet and Social Innovation (URGOCIS) Institute for Government and Public Policies (IGOP) – Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. [email protected] Communities making social change from below. Social innovation and democratic leadership in two Barcelona’s disenfranchised neighbourhoods. Abstract Drawing upon 4 initiatives of social innovation embedded in two disenfranchised neighbourhoods: Nou Barris Nord and Sants in Barcelona (Spain), we illustrate different ways in which bottom-up processes can contribute to neighbourhood resilience. The paper explores the nature of social change by bringing together systemic approaches to social innovation and relational theories of collective leadership. In this vein, it is argued that both contextual neighbourhood features and collective leadership practices dialectically explain not only how and why social innovation initiatives emerge but also their social impact in terms of effectiveness and scalability. Keywords: social innovation, democratic leadership, bottom-linked governance, neighbourhood resilience 1. Introduction The 2007 financial crash brought with it a new stage of the neoliberal project: public bailouts and austerity regimes embarked upon by assorted states and international organizations to save the global financial system (Lowndes & Pratchett 2012; Davies & Pill 2012; Peck 2012; Swyn- gedouw 2015). A huge wave of privatization and cuts was implemented across western countries, especially in Southern Europe, retrenching the role of the public sector. This opened up new opportunities for markets but also for social initiatives (Parés et al., 2017a). The second !1 phase of modernity – reflexive or liquid modernity (Bauman 1999; Giddens 1999; Beck 1992) – definitively evolved into a non-state-centric model in which the state no longer provides the principal means of compensating for market failure. In Spain, as in other Southern European countries, the recession and subsequent austerity policies brought about dramatic effects in terms of poverty, social exclusion, unemployment, fore- closures and so on (Leon & Pavolini 2014). However, in 2011 insurgent citizens and incipient urban political movements unsettled the neoliberal status quo and the austerity paradigm noted above (Swyngedouw 2015; Fregonese 2013). The Indignados movement burst in Barcelona, Madrid, and many other Spanish cities and towns. Since then, new forms of urban activism emerge while old social organizations adapt to the new societal context (Gualini et al. 2016; Walliser 2013). Citizens are, increasingly, self-organizing in order to produce innovative solu- tions to face the collective problems that governments are failing to solve in a context of scar- city and austerity policies (Parés et al., 2017b).Where and how do these responses emerge? How are they carried out? What are their impacts? In this paper we focus on two communities – at neighbourhood level - in Barcelona (Nou Barris Nord and Sants) to better understand how socially innovative processes take place in a context of crisis. We argue that both contextual neighbourhood features and collective leadership practices dialectically explain not only where, how and why social innovation initiatives emerge but also their social impact in terms of effectiveness and scalability. As we will demonstrate through empirical analysis of four initiatives, context – understood as a varying path-dependent and spatio-temporal configuration of constraints and opportunities – shapes how and where social innovation emerges and in what form. We will specially focus on civic capacity, defined as the ability to coalesce governmental and non-governmental actors concerned with collective problems (Stone 2001) or, in other words, the extent to which different sectors of the community act in concert around a matter of community-wide import. Thus, we understand civic capacity as a community resourceand a contextual neighbourhood feature that varies from one neighbourhood to another. At the same time, however, we argue that we need agency-based explanations in order to com- prehend the capacity of socially innovative initiatives to catalyse collective action in particular ways, in specific conjunctures and broader structural contexts. As Moulaert et al. (2016) have already suggested, new avenues for analysing socially innovative initiatives are opened up by understanding social change as a process driven by context-sensitive dialectical relationship between neighbourhood features and collective agency, materialized through discursive practices and mediated by institutions. More concretely, we will analyse collective agency through leadership practices, understood as collective and meaning-making interventions and patterns of behaviour that make things different from what they were before, fostering social change. Leadership is a unique type of meaning-making process. This is so because the shared agreements that produce leadership are arti- culated and generated within a community of practice, or a group working to achieve results (Ospina et al., 2012). In the reminder of this paper, first we briefly introduce our methodological framework and defi- ne the concepts we are working with. We then present our two communities in separate sections. In each community we describe the socially innovative initiatives analysed and describe their historical-geographical path-dependencies, leadership practices and impacts. In the last section we relate our analysis to theliterature, reflecting on the strengths and limitations of these initiatives in the context of their respective neighbourhoods. We also suggest some strategies for in- creasing the effectiveness and scalability of social innovation. Theory and methods Social innovation is usually conceptualized as a way of improving territorial development in disenfranchised neighbourhoods (MacCallum et al. 2009; Moulaert et al. 2010; Van Dyck & !2 Van den Broeck 2013). This approach highlights the importance of context – historical and geographical – and path-dependencies in understanding how socially innovative practices emerge and how they may become processes of social change. However, little attention has been paid to the dynamics by which innovations emerge, how social impact or scalability could be achieved and, finally, how social change could be effectively accomplished through socially innovative responses at the community level. Indeed, the study of leadership, as the agential dimension of change, has been almost entirely absent in studies of social innovation. This paper combines the analysis of ‘neighbourhood features’ and ‘collective leadership practices’ to better understand how communities are facing the effects of economic recession through socially innovative initiatives in Barcelona. To the best of our knowledge, an approach that brings together critical theories of collective leadership and disruptive theories of social innovation is a novel undertaking. We focus on the impacts that socially innovative initiatives are triggering, defining these impacts in terms of effectiveness and scalability (Parés et al., 2017b). Drawing on Moulaert's et al. (2013) definition of social innovation, we understand effectiveness as the extent to which a socially innovative initiative achieves the desired social transformation with respect to: a) resol- ving the social problem it set out to address, b) empowering citizens, and c) producing changes in social and power relations. Scalability, on the other hand, refers to the capacity of a socially innovative initiative to expand or grow by way of either scaling out or scaling up. Scaling out refers to an initiative engaging more people, being more inclusive and broadly solving the problem it set out to address. Scaling up refers to an initiative expanding up from the local level to a new geographical context be- yond the neighbourhood. Concurrent to new forms of social innovation arising around the world, concepts such as distri- buted, shared, collaborative and collective leadership have gained currency both in the academic literature (Uhl-Bien & Ospina 2012) and in the world of practice (Heifetz et al. 2009). These concepts challenge traditional views of leadership and shift attention from formal leaders and their influence on followers to the relational processes that illuminate the contribution of all to constituting leadership in a group, organization or system (Ospina & El Hadidy 2013; Ospina 2006). More concretely, in order to assess the inpact of social innovation initiatives we have focus on three sorts of leadership practices (Ospina et al. 2012): • Unleashing human energies: leadership practices that empower the have-nots, practices that stem from the assumption that knowledge is power. • Bridging difference: leadership practices that create the conditions to bring divers actors or social groups together and facilitate their joint work while maintaining, appreciating and drawing on their differences. •

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